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Category: Comics

Sheet. I haven’t posted in a long time here. Work has been kick me up inside the backside and I pretty much come home, do stuff I have to do and then veg out in Fallout 4 then it’s up early and back to the grind.

First, I found on drive thru a FREE updated version of FASERIP. This is that old yellow box Marvel game TSR put out that we tried to play instead of Champions or TMNT for once… and at 12 years old or so, failed utterly. I owe it to myself to try it some time as I tossed the yellow box and contents into the garbage about 10 years ago.

I’ve read some comics recently, some good, some bad, some in the middle. Needless to say, the superhero genre is only loosely represented in what I like to read.

Legacy of Luther Strode

This was an interesting series, 6 issues, and the very end of the Luther Strode series (really?). Tradd Moore’s art is unique and very clean. The first few issues were excellent, though light, fare. However, near the end and especially the last issue, It was a bit of a let down, just not dense and at the end of the last issue, I was like: why did I pick this up? I felt like I missed everything and had no idea what the characters were talking about when they were talking and not throwing down. However, many of the fight scenes in these are fantastic. Maybe you had to know all the characters first? Looking forward to more Tradd Moore stuff though after this taste.

LOW

I liked this book a lot, until the mutant mice appeared and then… I just kept plodding along with issues. I’m hoping it concludes. It had moments of absolute brilliance early on. Tocchini is amazing. Read about the first 12 issues. Then stop.

HEAD LOPPER

Adventure Time style art and Ultra violent viking shit. What’s not to love? It’s a lighter book (what did you expect?) but quality through and through.

BPRD

This series has been going strong for awhile now. I picked up some of the older trades in a used bookstore a few weeks back and was very impressed. BRPD is an offshoot of HELLBOY: this series is the fish guy, the fire girl and some others who are paranormal investigators and destroyers. It’s a bit like THE OTHERS board game or Xmen vs Cthulhu, and of course, could be compared to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with a lot less tracking of allusions! Recommended.

The FUTURE

Looks like fans of Moebius and Numenera/The Strange has another friend in Rick Remender with his upcoming comic: SEVEN TO ETERNITY. First issue looks like it’s out now.

While I think LOW, one of my current favorites, may have jumped the shark with sentient MICE, I was happy to find issue 3 of Head Lopper sitting on the shelf and it’s superlative. Think viking violence mashed in with adventure time. I also picked up Miracle Man Olympus from the Alan Moore period where he teams up with the soon-after-to-be Swamp Thing artist. Also just finished Junji Ito’s UZUMAKI, which I had only read parts of on the internet in the past. Highly recommended.

Two big comics from my errant youth may be back in action– both TOY BASED and should have been total shit, but both the early Micronauts and the middle run of ROM were excellent. Yes yes, the endings of both series were quite bad, but at that point both had been handed off to various other teams and artists and it just naturally turned to shit. I’m very interested in what IDW does with these two. The plot of ROM was fantastic for one, and Micronauts wasn’t too shabby either.

The only worry for me is that Micronauts has had at least one reboot (not including Micronauts Voyages which killed off all the characters in the end) and it was awful, so we’ll see… Go Baron Karza Go!

It’s terrifying and awesome. Basically you see a picture you like and you can click on it, then you can search for more images LIKE that one by zooming in on a part of the image. While this could be very useful for just about everything, the obvious use is obvious.

of course I’m just searching for a camel-toe style bathing suit for Spring…

Seriously though, it’s pretty great for other stuff as well– really it is.

For those of you steeped in Marvel geekery in the mid-eighties, this is a fucking brilliant read about the abhorrent Cloak and Dagger Secret Wars 2 crossover. I had come out of my “buy everything Marvel” phase around this time with just how shit ROM had become and how piss Secret Wars II was from the outset– even as a little kid it was obvious something had gone terribly wrong with comics that would only be redeemed by the shallow but beautiful Image comics late in the decade. This was also the time I started getting into Epic Magazine, Heavy Metal, Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing and Cerebus (which was just a confusing mess for a kid really) so it was a distinctive shift from mainstream comics. Reading this, you can fucking SEE why in all the gory detail.

Last weekend I had a bender in Miami. Part of this bender was being passed out on a couch with the TV on. Dark Shadows was playing over and over on one of the various cable channels and I was awake during one of the showings to watch the crazy furniture shattering fuck scene between Johnny Depp and Eva Green, a vampire and a witch respectively. That same evening I stumbled with Matt into a dark theater playing 300: Rise of an Empire. During the movie Eva Green is again involved in an insane fuck sequence with the main Athenian Character. Given that it was Alpha Male fucking Alpha Female for the win, this wasn’t actually too disturbing, but to have seen this same actress in two different films having furniture destroying fuck sequences was a fairly comedic coincidence to me.

Now, I guess I’m not a fan of 300 Rise of an Empire and will be even less so of the next film that doesn’t have Eva Green in it since her character gets eviscerated, but there are two notable things about it: the above mentioned sex scene and the multiple scenes of Eva Green’s character staring from a bow of her ship with her right eye twitching in anger–that’s one for the meme pile. The rest of the film, while visually stunning in parts is just plagued by… well, everything. They paint the main Athenian as some sort of physical badass, where he could have played the part not like Leonidas (since we already had the sacrificial alpha male in the first movie) but instead a scheming little rat who plays all these tricks on the Persians for the win. He did play tricks in the movie over and over and over so this would have fit (and also made a better contrast between Athens and Sparta) as they also characterize him as someone totally awesome at everything– sword fighting, archery, etc. He literally is a character characterized by his complete lack of any weaknesses in character or prowess–sort of like Superman. Also, the Athenians made the Spartans look sort of pussy, which just ain’t right. In 300, the Spartans work together as a UNIT to defeat the Persians, but the Athenians are seen fighting in Rise of an Empire like the Germanic and Celt tribes would– mano y mano in a full on melee. What’s more, the Athenian leader gives I believe FOUR pre-battle speeches, with all the heartfelt music playing and all that. That was ridiculous. Overall, the film just could have been so much better. I’m glad I saw it, if nothing more to make fun ever more of the gouts of blood that issued forth whenever someone was so much as touched by a sword, but Hotel Budapest was playing in a packed theatre next door, and I would have much rather seen that in retrospect. Anyway, back to the fucking. Below are two vids from the movies in question. You can see watching them the same day would create a comic juxtaposition.

I finally picked up the newest League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (Nemo Heart of Ice) and while extremely short, it is chocked full of references. Nearly every comic PANEL has some reference to an earlier work, many of which you have never heard of. While of course it hits the Jules Verne stuff and in this particular story, tons of Lovecraftian references as well, there are numerous sources I had never even heard of. I bet eventually in the span of time, these comics will be published with annotations, but for now we have to turn to the internet.

Anyway, highly recommended. It’s not the best LoEG book (the first two were incredible and Black Dossier was an astounding achievement for a sourcebook) but it’s great. My only complaint is that it was way too short but in light of thinking that CENTURY was the end of the series, it’s all good. The art, in particular, is astounding.